


Hydra Peter Parker

by ronkeyfong



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Peter Parker, F/M, Hydra Peter Parker, Peter Parker Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:15:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29569488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ronkeyfong/pseuds/ronkeyfong
Summary: Hydra Peter, who gets out, and has to adjust to freedom. Imma get rid of hydra pretty quick, bc I'm too lazy to draw it out
Relationships: Peter Parker & Avengers Team, Peter Parker & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 1
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> read at your own risk, I may abandon this, bc I'm a fickle bicth.
> 
> If you recognise themes from other similar fics, I probably used them as inspiration lol

When Peter woke up that morning, it wasn’t to the grating buzz of the alarm and the blinding intensity of the overhead lights. This time, the alarm was constant and wailing, and instead of the usual bright white, the lights were red and flashing. They were under attack. Okay. Right. Cool. This is fine. Hydra had always been able to neutralise threats before they could even consider becoming a problem, whether it be a government employee looking a little too closely at the wrong documents, or a harmless hiker who strayed too far. He’d never admit it, but those were the kills he hated the most. But this was the final showdown.

Peter had always been unlike the others in the facility, because Peter had been chosen. He wasn’t supposed to, god knows they’d done everything in their power to get rid of the memories, but he could still sometimes remember a soft voice singing to him, or fingers carding through his hair. Those were the memories he shoved right to the back of his mind whenever they started the shocks, because if he refused to admit they were there, even to himself, then they stayed. 

But apparently Peter’s father had developed a genetically modified spider. This was never supposed to have happened. It was a complete accident that Peter had been bitten when he was 6, and a complete fluke that he survived the bite. Before his dad could even think about looking into it, the Hydra plant gathering information on his research killed him and his mom and took Peter. 

Peter doesn’t remember the first 2 years here. He chooses not to remember the pain of the experiments, the punishments, the exhaustion of his early training. He definitely doesn’t remember the hope. The feeling of waiting to wake up and it having all been a nightmare, or the hope of someone rescuing him. Hydra had zapped that right out of him. 

Peter doesn’t have trigger words. He obeys because this is how it always has been. You wake up, you train, sometimes you get a mission. You eliminate the target, you get the information, you don’t leave a trace. You return, you report, and you get to live another day. What Peter doesn’t tell them is the flashes of an earlier life that still float around when he’s trying to sleep if they haven’t zapped him in a while. He doesn’t tell them about how he hates seeing the light leave his targets eyes, because he’s fairly certain he isn’t even supposed to be able to feel these things. 

He doesn’t hope for a better life because there is no such thing. Life could be a lot worse, it could be like the early days when he could still resist, and inevitably got punished for it. 

Peter was their most valuable asset, that was why they kept him here in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. He was the perfect replacement for the Winter Soldier. He was more agile, even stronger, he could stick to things, he could heal faster, and he had a funny kind of precognition. The problem was they couldn’t get rid of Peter. He sometimes spoke out of turn, and paid for it. He sometimes joked and he had interests. And he had dangerous ideas. But they didn’t know about those. They didn’t know that he knew more than he was letting on, and perhaps worst of all, they didn’t know that he remembered. 

But Peter was the Winter Spider, and he was Hydra’s best hope.


	2. Chapter 2

Like all the best things in Tony’s life, finding this base was a complete fluke. He was messing around with some old SHIELD files when FRIDAY had stumbled on a set of coordinates buried deep in some old report. The more Tony looked into it, the more this was looking like Sokovia all over again - not the whole floaty city, robot invasion thing, more the deeply buried secrets that were never supposed to see the light of day. 

The Avengers were kind of old hats at taking over Hydra bases at this point. Tony hated to admit it, but the whole ‘cut off one head, and two more take its place’ thing was infuriatingly accurate. The only saving grace is that the heads weren’t necessarily smart or dangerous ones, sometimes they were just little gatherings in warehouses that DUM-E could probably deal with. But this was a proper one, with guard posts and electric fences and soldiers.

With Wanda, Vision, and the Hulk on their side, it didn’t take long to reach the base. What Tony wasn’t expecting, however, was to see the Hydra agents spilling out of the building like ants. They were easy enough to deal with in the open, and when they were swiftly followed by the Hulk, things started making more sense.

“Hey, that’s a funny looking sheepdog.”

“Shut up, Tony. Bruce is just... enjoying himself”

Tony watched the Hulk launch an unsuspecting soldier over the treeline, before turning to face the entrance again. “Yeah, okay. Are we done? I think we’re done. I’m gonna go look at their shit.”

“It’s not worth it, they’ve already wiped everything.” Tony whipped his head up at the voice, but couldn’t see where it was coming from. FRIDAY locked onto the voice’s heat signature, and Tony swiftly launched a repulsor blast at it. This seemed to surprise the figure, but it leapt out of the way before it could make contact. Tony heard Cap and Clint arrive behind him, but he was too busy trying to find the guy in the tree to worry about it. 

It turns out that, in the scheme of things, this was probably something Tony should have worried about. When he eventually did glance around, it was to see Clint slumped on the ground unconscious and Cap with his legs tied together and head bleeding. “Holy fuck.” Tony muttered, before starting towards Cap. “What happened?”

“He’s..enhanced….strong...and quick...and an asshole.” Cap grumbled as Tony cut through the bindings with lasers, and what the fuck was this stuff? 

“Hey! That was mean!” Tony heard, before a black figure leapt out of a nearby tree, fist raised for a punch to Tony. Before he could even raise a repulsor, or dodge, or do anything other than panic, the figure suddenly stopped in mid air.

Tony still had reservations about Wanda being on the team, but moments like this really made it worth it. Red tendrils wrapped around the man’s body, suspending his struggling form. “Holy shit. I’ve gotta admit, wasn’t expecting that one.”

“Come on Wanda, knock him out!” Tony had barely spoken the words when the figure suddenly went limp, and Wanda emerged, eyes red and fingers twirling, from behind a nearby tree.

Clint, now conscious, was making small noises of complaint from the ground, but Tony suspected it was more his pride that was damaged than his skull. “He came out of nowhere. Didn’t even hear him coming.”

“No offence, Legolas, but that’s not really a big deal coming from you. Put him in the quinjet, we’ll stick him in the Hulk tank until we figure out what his deal is.”

Wanda nodded, carrying the figure away from the base, Clint following on behind. “You take the ground floor, I’ll take the top floor?” Cap suggested, wiping his bloody forehead and gesturing towards the base. Tony nodded, before making his way inside. 

After blowing the place up, which was equal parts out of necessity and just for entertainment, the team gathered on the Quinjet. Clint and Cap had ice packs held to their heads, Wanda was slumped against Vision, Banner was dozing in a seat and Falcon was piloting. But Natasha was watching the black-clad figure with her full attention. His mask was off and Tony took in the short, brown curls and boyish face before realising with a punch to the gut that he was just a kid. He was wearing a kind of spandex suit, tight to his body. He had a belt on that had holsters obviously designed for knives and guns, which was mildly concerning. 

Without turning around, Natasha spoke up. “You didn’t find anything about him, did you?”

Taken aback, Tony responded, “Nada. He was right, everything was wiped clean.” 

“Yeah. Thought so. I think he’s the Winter Spider.”

Tony’s blood ran cold. “Wh-what?”

“This is what they’ve been hiding, what we’ve been missing. I heard rumours, a couple years ago, about a brand new assassin. A new supersoldier, raised by Hydra. He was probably still in training, back then. I think he’s it.”

“But… he’s just a kid.”

“Yeah.” she murmured.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> plot might start getting a little squiffy, dw its because I don't give a shit.

When Peter woke up, it wasn’t a quick thing. Usually, he was immediately aware of where he was and what he needed to do. If he’d been shocked, or if the scientists had been particularly creative the night before, he needed like thirty seconds for his brains to unscramble and for Peter to sort himself out.

This felt like fighting his way through a thick fog. He was in a bright room, not bright like his room at the base, but like a normal room. He was slumped over a table, which was cold and hard, probably metal. His head was resting on his arms, which were extended in front of him and handcuffed to the middle of the desk. Well, fuck. He tried to move his legs, but they were attached to the chair legs. He raised his head, blinking thickly, trying to sort out a plan. Peter had managed to never be caught while on a mission. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how to escape. 

Okay, correction. Peter thought he knew how to escape. But the chair was bolted to the floor, along with the table. There was no chain between the cuffs, so no wriggle room, and the metal was most likely a vibranium alloy, because he could not break any part of the cuffs or the chair or the bolts on the table. Ah, Fuck. He was apparently in a glass cell, with at least one of them being a false wall. He was pretty sure people were watching him, and if not there was almost certainly a camera here somewhere.

Resigning himself to his fate, he leaned his head on the table and started clearing his head. It was easier to deal with torture when your mind was clear. It makes checking out easier, and if Peter could focus on other things, the pain wouldn’t be so bad. There would be an opportunity to escape, there always was. He had always known that if the base was ever captured, that was it. His project would be wiped clean, the scientists would kill themselves, and Peter would take up another identity and go to a secondary base somewhere.

Peter wasn’t a moron. He knew about the massive data leak that almost decimated Hydra. He knew about all the other soldiers who’d been killed in cryo. He saw them getting more and more desperate, his targets alternating between incredibly important and risky to innocent nobodies. But if he could get to a secondary location, he might be able to go back before his handlers got antsy, before they could make his life even worse.

It took maybe half an hour for the door to his cell to open, as if this would make him sweat. That had been one of the first things stamped out of him. He sat up slowly, stretching his shoulders as much as possible and yawning widely as two people took seats across from him. 

It was Black Widow and Captain America. He tried not to show his surprise, but he wasn’t entirely successful judging by the glint in Black Widow’s eye. Two of Hydra’s greatest targets were sitting right in front of him. If he took them out, he’d definitely get a reward. Maybe they’d let him take a break from training, maybe let him stop killing for a while. He’d definitely get out of being punished for being caught in the first place. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Got a name?” said Black Widow, not deigning a response, apparently. 

“Nope.” She just raised an eyebrow. “Can we get to the good bit? Speed this up a bit. Gotta see a guy...about a thing...I can’t remember the saying. You know what I mean.”

“Good bit?” Captain America asked, bracing his forearms on the table.

“Beating, shocking, et cetera. You know the drill.” Black Widow’s face stayed the same, but Captain America looked mildly disturbed.

“We aren’t going to torture you, that’s not how we operate.” Peter just raised his eyebrows and gave a couple of exaggerated nods. Sure. “How old are you?” Peter stayed silent.

“That’s okay.” She said, opening a file on a tablet she’d brought in with her. “I already know. You’re sixteen, you’ve been with Hydra for 10 years. And you’re the Winter Spider.”

Peter tried to keep his expressionless mask on, but he could feel the blood draining from his face. They were supposed to have buried all of this, everything was supposed to have been destroyed. Nothing was supposed to link back to him. He was so fucked.

“I also know that you want to get out.” At this, Peter snapped his head up. 

“No I don’t, where’d you get that idea from?” 

Her expression softened. “Because if you were truly the same as the others, you’d have killed yourself too. So, what’s your name?”

Peter didn’t break eye contact, but he sure as shit felt like doing it. Just because he didn’t kill himself, doesn’t mean he isn’t Hydra. It doesn’t mean anything.

“One of the scientist’s pills didn’t work. They were very forthcoming about you.” Captain America added.

He turned to face him, pointing a finger from where it was shackled to the desk. “Aw, was it the ginger one? Yeah, he’s always been a little..” Peter grimaced and pulled a face. 

“He told us all about your abilities, how you got them, what you can do, the limits.” His voice softened a little. “How they find out the limits.” Peter just shrugged. It’s been a few months since the last round of testing. They only do it once a year, because it always completely fucks Peter up for a couple of weeks, when he could be doing better things than being frozen or cut or whatever. “But even they don’t know your name.”

He eyed Black Widow for a few minutes, before saying, “You know, they once told me about you, and how you betrayed Hydra, and about the things they’re going to do to you when they get you back. Some of the newer scientists are VERY creative.” They always come back. Peter watched what they did to the last defector. And he died before they were done torturing him anyway. “It doesn’t matter whether I want to defect or not. I know the consequences, and I’m not taking my chances.”

She just nodded, as if this was totally reasonable, “The main problem, before I chose to leave, was hope.” Peter froze. “I mean, they used to do some dark stuff, but it all got a lot easier when I gave up hope of it ever getting better. I decided that hope was holding me back. Whenever I let myself hope, and when that hope inevitably was crushed, it made it harder. So I gave up. Eventually, I let myself hope one more time, and now I’m out. So..” she shrugged. Peter didn’t trust himself to respond.

She let out a little sigh before Captain America placed a sandwich on the table. “I also know what being enhanced does to your metabolism. I know you haven’t eaten in at least 36 hours. See, we know the what, but we need the who. Give us your name, and you can have the sandwich.” 

To be honest, Peter didn’t need Hydra’s training to be disappointed with how tempted he was by a sandwich. He bit his lip, before shaking his head like a wet dog. “No. I can starve.” He’d gone a lot longer with a lot less. “I can’t say anything.”

They nodded, and Captain America seemed to want to say something before Black Widow put a hand on his forearm and they walked out. They left the sandwich on the table in front of his hands, within reach.


	4. Chapter 4

They moved him to a room without a table a few hours later. Peter hadn’t eaten the sandwich. It had a bed, bolted to the floor. A toilet, sink and shower. The first day, Peter just sat in the corner of the room. He was dressed in a pair of grey sweatpants and a t-shirt, which were far softer than anything he’d ever been given before. Black Widow came to visit him. She crouched in front of him, outside the glass and made eye contact, unblinking. When he eventually blinked, she smirked, pushing a plate of something warm and nice smelling through the slot in the door, and left. 

The second day, he curled up on the bed. This was the longest he’d gone without being shocked in 3 years. He didn’t like it. Now, it wasn’t just before sleep that he remembered what the fingers in his hair felt like. What the gentle singing sounded like. It was almost constant, the way the gentle humming of the unfamiliar woman bounced around his skull. No one had come to torture him yet.

Peter had a set of rules he’d learned over the years. Some were for a successful mission, some were for avoiding punishments. Some were methods of memorisation, some were just methods of remembering who he is. The things he needed to hang on to despite the zapping, the things that, if Hydra took, would make Peter Parker cease to exist. 

One of the rules was to never hope, because hope was the easiest thing to gain and the hardest thing to lose. The longer he spent here, not being zapped, not training, not studying, the more parts of himself he started remembering, and the harder he had to try to stave off hope. 

That day, Black Widow came back. She talked to him in a few different languages, in what was possibly the world’s most superficial conversation ever. Most of Peter’s answers were lies, but the point wasn’t what he was saying, it was the language. She spoke more languages than he did, and he spoke one she didn’t. They jumped from English, to Russian, to Spanish, to German, to French, to Mandarin, to Portuguese. Black Widow had never bothered learning Portuguese, but she knew Italian and a lot of Asian dialects he couldn’t even approach. 

It was only the third day, and already he remembered his old tutor sneaking him a cupcake on his 15th birthday. He’d been killed four months later. He remembered the time he tried to escape when he was 11, taking out the guards swiftly and silently. Then he remembered his handler, with a black eye, strapping him into the chair and putting the guard in his mouth, being zapped for the longest stretch yet.  
Captain America came in that day, and told him all about Hydra. The parts they hadn’t told him. Their role in WW2, the terrorism, their aims to cause panic and chaos and pain. Peter pretended he wasn’t listening. He told him about Bucky, his friend who’d been taken by Hydra and programmed into a soldier he didn’t want to be. How happy he was now. He tried to get information for a few minutes, and when he realised he wouldn’t talk he slipped Peter a book called The Great Gatsby, which Peter read in one sitting. He’d never read a fiction book before.

He took a shower, and it was hot. He used new soap, something fresh and clean smelling, and washed his whole body before standing under the stream for perhaps 45 minutes. It was the first shower he’d taken that hadn’t been 5 minutes long and cold. He let the tears slip down his cheeks; no one would see them.

On the fourth day, he doubted. He knew it was treason, but he couldn’t help it. Peter had always been told that he was too smart for his own good. He’d never enjoyed killing the way that the other assassins who’d trained him had. He never killed unless he had to: it was one of his rules for remembering himself. None of his missions had collateral damage. Peter had told himself and his handlers had assumed it was efficiency, and he was praised for it. In the horrible clarity that the nearly constant pain had never afforded him, he could admit that it was because he didn’t like killing.

On that day, Mr Stark visited. He said that if Peter couldn’t give him any information, he’d be taken to the raft and if he cooperated, he might be able to be pardoned. The name slipped out before he could stop it. Donald Beck. He was his primary handler, and ultimately the name wouldn’t lead anywhere. Hydra’s method for staying alive wasn’t a secret. They had thousands of individual databases, bank accounts, properties, powerful individuals, but the connections between them didn’t exist. Cut off one, there are more to take its place. 

The problem was Peter had just betrayed Hydra, in a moment of weakness where he hadn’t thought. Hydra had prepared him to withstand all manner of torture. They hadn’t prepared him for kindness, and they had underestimated Peter’s inherent loyalty to the cause and the effectiveness of suppressing his emotions. Possibly worse was that Peter didn’t regret it. He was warmer, and felt safer than he ever had before, and couldn't bring himself to think about going back.

Peter sat on the bed, huddled in the blanket feeling tears drip down his cheeks, and tried not to freak out. He didn’t want this. He told Natasha that he was never supposed to be an assassin. How they used him for experiments, how they were just trying to replicate the effects of the spider bite. How after 3 years they’d had absolutely no success, and they were about to throw in the towel. Instead of creating a new soldier, they switched their focus to training him to be a soldier. 

He threw himself into training, because if he slipped up, or failed a mission, then they could always go back to experimentation. By 12, he was a fully trained assassin, more knowledgeable, stronger, better trained than most others. Things could be worse, and he thought it wouldn't get much better than this. They thought about programming him, but apparently it didn’t work on kids. Too many unstable emotions. So they started shocking him to make him forget the good stuff. If there was no good, there was no hope. 

But now he was remembering, there was the possibility of hope. He began remembering every anti-Hydra thought they believed they’d zapped out of him. And he desperately tried to push the hope away, but unfortunately the Peter from before was coming back, and not-hoping was against his nature. 

The fifth day, he talked to Natasha again. They were sitting cross legged, either side of the glass wall. “Why did you leave?” He tried to keep the question neutral, but this is the longest he’d gone between shocks in 8 years, and he was remembering and his head was busy and he was clean and warm and comfortable. He doubted that he was successful.

To her credit, Natasha didn’t smirk about it. “I was raised to be the perfect spy. The perfect assassin. I knew no other life, until I met Clint. I got on SHIELD’s radar for the wrong reasons, and he was sent to kill me. Instead, he offered me an out and I took it. I gave up hope years ago, and I knew there was no way that I could escape on my own. In the end, I realised that, sometimes, hope is all we have, and if we never hope for better, things never can be better. I took the opportunity, got out, and never looked back. It was the best thing I ever did.” 

“My name’s Peter.” he whispered, not making eye contact. “I hate killing, and I do want out. But if I don’t kill, or if I escape, they shock me for ages. I don’t know what it is, but it’s the worst thing they do. It feels like someone’s drilling directly into my skull and it makes me forget stuff all the time. I guess they thought it was permanent, but since I haven’t been shocked in a while, I keep remembering stuff. I remember my life a little before. And I just remembered a pretty girl that kissed me when I was undercover in Germany when I was 13.” He looked back up at her. “I can’t go back, I can’t forget again.”

Her eyes softened slightly. “Peter, we can keep you safe. There’s a reason we have four ex-Hydra members in the Avengers. They can’t get to us.”

Peter bit his lip. “I had a tutor from when I was 9 to 15. I never knew his real name, I just called him Mr Green, but he didn’t want to be there, he wasn’t a fanatic like most people there. He had a son, who had some rare disease and needed treatment. Hydra provided the treatment, but he was dependent on them in order to survive. Eventually, he started trying to find the cure in the databases so he could leave, but instead found lots of information he shouldn’t have been able to find, and he wrote it all in a notebook. You know that saying? ‘Cut off one head, two takes its place’? He said, ‘you can’t cut off the head, Peter. You have to take it out below the neck’. He made me memorise it, before they could kill him and he said that if I was ever able to trust someone, that they could use the information to take down Hydra. For Good.”

For the first time, her mask slipped. The shock on her face was pretty satisfying. “If I give you this information, you have to be quick, and discrete. If you mess up, that’s it. They don’t know I know, but if you don’t get them all done in one go, they’ll figure it out and they’ll know it was me. And then I’ll be dead.” He fidgeted with the hem of his t-shirt for a minute. “You know, I was never specifically raised to hate all of you. They could never program me, like the others, but I think they assumed that if they could make me forget everything, there was no point. I mean it worked, I guess, I never questioned Hydra for years. But now I’m letting myself hope. I have a chance.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey y'all, I'm gonna shift to a more one shot style of writing after this bc my attention span sucks, just a heads up

By this point, the amount of people the Avengers had poached from Hydra was getting a little ridiculous. Natasha was sitting in front of Peter, a glass wall no longer between them, trying to pretend she didn’t know he was cheating in the card game she’d just taught him. He was adjusting well to life outside, trying to catch up on the parts of his education Hydra hadn’t bothered with, training in the gym with Natasha every now and then, watching movies and reading books. 

She didn’t know why she cared so much about what happened to Peter, perhaps it was because she had always said it was hard to find people with shared life experiences, and Peter’s upbringing hadn’t been too much different to hers. She knew he needed someone to talk to who actually understood what it was like to completely change your life after being nothing more than a tool for years. The few friends he had managed to make over the years were generally a lot older than him, and had a tendency to beat the shit out of him in training before disappearing and never coming back. 

Once the team met Peter, it didn’t take long for them to realise that they needed to get him out of Hydra and rehabilitate him rather than stick him in the raft. Hydra was supposed to be the height of military professionalism, yet here was a teenager quipping at people he was meant to be taking out swiftly and silently. More significantly, however, was that he chose to knock Cap and Clint out back at the base when he could have easily killed them. Natasha doubted that he made a conscious decision not to kill, but an assassin whose nature is not to kill is not someone who wants to be an assassin. Buried somewhere down in there was a person who didn’t want to take lives, who didn’t want to be Hydra. They just needed to give him a chance to figure that out for himself. 

As it turned out, it wasn’t as difficult as Natasha was expecting. They were fully prepared to deprogram him, they knew first hand the effects of electroshocks, but it became obvious that all Peter needed was time for some of his memories to come back. Once Peter started getting the best parts of him back, he realised that there was a way out. However, what Natasha wasn’t expecting whatsoever was that Peter had the key to taking down Hydra nestled in his brain. 

It was strange, watching from the other side of the glass as Peter worked on the notebook. He numbered the pages, then jumped from location to location, switching colours and pages. Every so often, he would stop and just cradle his head in his hands, rocking where he sat on the floor, before grabbing a pen and scribbling something down. When he was done, he shoved it through the slot in the door, before collapsing into bed and sleeping for 14 hours.

It was no secret that the Avengers had been doing all they could to take down Hydra. Cap in the beginning back in the dark ages or whenever, the data dump that blew all of Natasha’s covers, Wanda and Bucky leaving. It was frustrating to no end how they managed to survive through encrypted accounts and properties. She thinks Tony cried a little bit when he saw the notebook, and the previously unknown accounts and encryption codes that Peter had somehow remembered. 

It was literal gold. Hydra had already been unstable, and this would be the death blow. She knew Peter had cared about his tutor, the one who tried to give him a fairly normal - if extensive - education, but the guy had liked Peter so much and wanted to give him a chance to succeed so badly that he risked everything to give Peter the tools to take down Hydra once and for all. She understood, it was impossible to spend time with Peter and not like him. He could jump from talking about a physics thing he’d learnt about to a little anecdote about a mission he went on like it was nothing. And despite the things he'd been through, and all he'd lost, there was just something inherently likeable about Peter that they hadn't managed to take out of him.

Peter’s willingness to give up such vital information on Hydra and the fact that he’d been forced into his life as an assassin was enough for SHIELD to agree to leave him be. They were never going to make Peter’s history public anyway, let alone his identity, so Peter’s history could be allowed to remain in the past instead of making him pay for it. Peter had no family left, and realistically there were very few people who knew how to deal with someone like Peter. Any civilian that adopted him would never be able to know the truth about Peter’s past, and with the things Peter knew he could never fully assimilate into society. So, SHIELD proposed that Peter stay with the Avengers. They could keep an eye on him for SHIELD, who would always be a little paranoid, and if he really was completely out of Hydra he had the potential to be a valuable asset to the team. Objectively, he would be a great avenger. Amazing in combat, a good shot, and had unique abilities suited to their line of work. It's not like Peter needed babysitting, he was probably more mature than, like, at least Clint, so eventually the team agreed.

So that’s how they’d reached this point. Barely a month after SHIELD had been given the notebook, Hydra had finally been dismantled. Natasha had learned a long time ago that wars tended to just...fizzle out, and like all great wars Hydra ended with an exceptionally boring set of arrests and data dumps. It wasn’t as interesting to the public as all of Natasha’s aliases were, but there was a sense of finality with this one. Hydra plants were coming out of the woodwork everywhere, taking deals and doing time, bases were being raided, accounts being repossessed. 

Peter’s ex-handlers were killed during a raid in Argentina. Everyone agreed to not look too closely at the exact circumstances of their deaths. Plausible deniability, et cetera.

She glanced between the cards in her hand and Peter’s face, drawn in concentration. “You know I can see you stealing the cards, right?” She asked, absentmindedly rearranging her cards. Peter stiffened in his chair, fidgeting a little. 

“No, I’m not.” He faltered, deliberately not looking at her. “There is absolutely no reason for you to believe that.” She tilted her head, giving him a look she was fairly certain he could sense despite his eyes being firmly on his own cards.

“How were you ever a spy, you can’t lie for shit.” She scoffed, shaking her head and placing the cards on the table between them, showing the straight she already had.

“How did you do that? I’m pretty sure that’s, like, mathematically impossible or something.” he chucked his mishmash of useless cards to the table and folded his arms across his chest in a huff, before pointing a finger at her accusingly. “And I’ll have you know I was a great spy! But I was always kind of playing a different character, like at very least I had a different persona, sometimes I had a different name. I can lie if I need to, I’m not a moron.” She gave him another, more pointed look. “Yeah, okay. I kind of am a moron, that’s not the point.” 

Sitting up straighter, she punched his arm lightly “Come on then, I’ll show you the right way to cheat.” While he grabbed the cards, she sat back and studied him for a moment. “I’m proud of you, kid.”

He stalled in his shuffling to look up at her with wide eyes, before breaking out into a blinding grin. “I’m glad I could trust you. I mean, I’m glad I can trust you. I’m glad,” he blushed, “Thank you, for everything.”


End file.
